Many commercial, civic, scientific, and military operations have the need to remotely conduct surveillance of an environment. For example, military groups may have a need to conduct surveillance on a battlefield or in an urban area. Scientists may need to conduct surveillance of a forest or wetland area. Likewise, examples of surveillance activities in a commercial setting include warehouse surveillance, surveillance of large retail establishments, etc.
Currently, surveillance systems may use one or more deployed sensor devices that are capable of passing on collected information to users and/or user devices. For example, users may be able to go into the field and collect such information directly from field devices. More advanced surveillance systems may use some form of remote connection to automatically send collected information back to a data collection system (or the like), so that the collected information can be analyzed, stored and tracked over time, etc. However, these current systems have limitations, including those related to limited energy supply for field devices, sensor deployment and placement issues, remote information storage and retrieval issues, satellite issues, network bandwidth issues, disruption issues, obstruction issues, etc. In addition, with respect to large surveillance systems (e.g., those having many sensors), information multiplication problems may exist, which may overload human users of the information. For example, current surveillance systems may produce only a small amount of relevant information and a relatively large amount of irrelevant information, which users must then filter through.